Part perspective, part history lesson, this look at what the Web is now and what it was once upon time is quite an interesting read. Check it out!

Yesterday I started reading Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters, and it is wonderful. It literally is changing my perspective about how I think about the world we live in, and where we want to go from here.(Thank you for the suggestion, Aaron and Evan.)

So far the chapter that has really resonated with me most is The Other Road Ahead, in which Paul writes,

With web-based software, most users won’t have to think about anything except the applications they use. All the messy, changing stuff will be sitting on a server somewhere, maintained by the kind of people who are good at that kind of thing… Desktop software forces users to become system administrators. Web-based software forces programmers to. There is less stress in total, but more for the programmers…

One thing that might deter you from writing web-based applications is the lameness of web pages as a UI. That is a problem, I admit. There were a few things we would have really liked to add to HTML and HTTP. What matters, though, is that web pages are just good enough…

Because web-based software assumes nothing about the client, it will work anywhere the Web works. That’s a big advantage already, and the advantage will grow as new web devices proliferate. Users will like you because your software just works, and your life will be easier because you won’t have to tweak it for every new client…

You don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to develop web-based applications. You don’t have to do licensing deals, or get shelf space in retail stores, or grovel to have your application bundled with the OS. You can deliver software right to the browser, and no one can get between you and potential users without preventing them from browsing the Web.